The Fat Years

knew I’d been right. He remembers that month. We are the same, and I’ve finally proved that I’m not alone. Ha! He is Zhang Dou, and I made him my brother, closer than a flesh-and-blood brother.

In two years, he’s the only person I’ve found who is like me. Everybody else is different.

At first I thought all those other people just didn’t want to talk about the events of that month. Then later I realized that they recalled things wrongly, completely differently from the way I remembered them. Finally I came to the conclusion that in all their memories there were twenty-eight days missing. In order to verify this memory loss, I went to the library to look up the daily and weekly newspapers from that year, but the library had only online versions and it was no longer possible to read the printed versions. The online reports of those twenty-eight days were completely different from my memory of them: they held that the world economy had gone into crisis at the same time as the official start of China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. The horrifying month that came between these two historical events had completely disappeared.

For a while I thought that even though the government had distorted the truth, at least the common people would remember what had happened, but later on I had to admit that it was a case of total collective amnesia.

Complete collective amnesia. I suspected that this amnesia was related to the nationwide bird flu inoculation that spring, but I could not confirm my suspicion.

I started to frequent Beijing’s secondhand bookstores looking for related reports, but all I could find were official government newspapers and mindless entertainment magazines. There were no publications that carried the truth.

I bought a Jeep Cherokee in Beijing and took off south on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao highway to collect more evidence of that month. It was only in rather strange places, though, that I found a few snippets of corroborating evidence. For example, in a guesthouse at the foothills of Mount Huang, I found a complete issue of the financial magazine Caijing that reported on how the new round of great economic decline in early February of that year was affecting China; at Hengdian World Film Studios in Zhejiang, I saw part of an Asia Weekly magazine from Hong Kong that reported on how the people were hoarding food that year; in a squalid urban village near Wuhan University in Hubei, I picked up half of an old China Youth Daily, published by the Communist Youth League, in which the main article, “The Leviathan Has Arrived,” introduced the seventeenth-century Western political philosopher Thomas Hobbes; the general theme of the article was that given a choice between anarchy and dictatorship, people will always choose the latter. Another article was a retrospective report describing how the government had failed miserably during the 2008 riot of over ten thousand people in Wan-an in Guizhou Province, when the police were accused of covering up the death of a young girl; in the Tujia ethnic region of Xiangxi in Hunan, I found an incomplete clipping from the Southern Weekly; it was an advertisement on how to use a made-in-China radio-because at that time many people were afraid that the power supply would fail and they would not be able to watch TV or surf the net, so they bought radios. On the reverse side of that advertisement was an article discussing the 1983 crackdown on criminality.

As time went by, media evidence was harder and harder to come by. That’s why I was so ecstatic when I found that late-February Southern Weekly with its clear evidence of that missing month.

I became much more anxious to find people like myself. I made a list of all the people I knew. The ones I believed always to have a clear understanding of things I called clearheaded people. I went to talk to these clearheaded people one by one, but came back disappointed every time. Am I like the lone survivor on earth whom we see in those apocalypse movies? But the heroes in those films are always destined to find other survivors later on. I relied on that idea to persist resolutely in my search.

Finally I met Zhang Dou. We both believe that this is only a beginning. Out of more than a billion Chinese people there must be many more like us.

I told Zhang Dou I’d been going to his home every day to see if Miaomiao and the dogs and cats needed anything. I like his kind and smiling Miaomiao and her pets more and more. Zhang Dou said that when he got out of the hospital I could come and live with them. Ha! I was quite excited. I need a safe place to store my accumulated evidence. I hope Zhang Dou gets out of the hospital soon.

A supplementary tape recording: I spent a few days visiting several big hospitals pretending to be sick but actually taking a look at their asthmatic patients. I tried to raise the issue of the missing month, but I was disappointed because none of them remembered it. I thought everyone taking corticosteroids would be just like Zhang Dou and me, but I was mistaken. I told Zhang Dou about my discovery, but I also told him that we must not give up. “We absolutely must not forget how lonely we used to be. As long as there might be Chinese people who have not forgotten that month, we definitely have to look for them.”

To prevent us forgetting, here is another supplementary tape: Last week on New East Road I ran into Lao Chen, a former journalist for Mingbao and the United Daily. I remembered that he used to be one of my clearheaded people who once helped me out with something important. Is he still a member of the clearheaded group? From the look in his eyes, I think the chances of him still being one of us are not great, but I should not let any opportunity go by. Look him up when you have time.

Lao Chen’s notebook on Fang Caodi

Little Xi, or feichengwuraook, didn’t return my e-mail, but Fang Caodi sent me one asking me to come and see him. I didn’t answer him immediately.

Recently all I’d been thinking of was Little Xi and I couldn’t seem to stop. But what was really weird was that when I thought about Little Xi, I also started thinking about Fang Caodi. I kept thinking about that time I saw him jogging near Happiness Village Number Two and all the mouleitao nonsense he kept spouting. For all the many years I’ve known him, I noted to myself, he’s always called me Lao Chen, but this time he actually called me Master Chen. I even started to think that Fang Caodi’s state of mind seemed to be in some inexplicable manner similar to Little Xi’s.

The other day I opened up a box that I have not opened since moving to Happiness Village Number Two and took out my notebooks-one of them was titled “Fang Caodi.” I started to read what I’d written:

Fang Caodi, original name Fang Lijun. Later on, when an artist with the same name suddenly became famous abroad, the Fang Lijun I knew changed his name to Fang Caodi.

I first came to know Fang Caodi when I was an editor at Hong Kong’s Mingbao and frequently received letters from an American reader signed “Old Fang.” Sometimes he corrected facts or evidence given in an article, but more often he would be offering us a great deal of related material, most of which was too detailed to print. I came to know that Old Fang understood a great many unofficial and secret aspects of contemporary China. Once I put a notice in the readers’ section asking him to give his real name and address, and he did. I even wrote back to thank him.

He paid particular attention to my articles, and he could even spot the ones I’d written under a nom de plume for the China page of Mingbao. To use a modern expression, he was my “fan.”

We first met in the summer of 1989 in Hong Kong, when he was on his way back to the mainland. I was surprised that he wanted to enter China at a time when so many others were trying to get out. He asked me if I was familiar with the organization that was rescuing leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement. I told him there was a Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Movements in China, but at that time I didn’t know there was also a secret organization spiriting people out of China.

I realized that his life experiences were quite unusual, so I invited him to meet me again the next day, and then I made these notes.

Fang Lijun’s or (Fang Caodi’s) ancestors came from Shandong. He was born in what was then known as Beiping in 1947. His father had joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Xinjiang, the restive northwestern province, together with the Xinjiang warlord Sheng Shicai. Later he went over to the Nationalist Party. In 1949, just before the People’s Liberation Army entered Beiping, he boarded a plane to Qingdao, and then took a ship to Taiwan, leaving behind his young third wife and his youngest child-Fang Lijun.